Analyst: Buy Activision, not EA

Deutsche Bank's Jeetil Patel reckons Activision's got plenty to make it worth your money, and EA... hasn't.

In a note published by GameDaily, the analyst said, speaking of Activision:

"While the company has sizably outperformed prior cycle profitability by a significant margin, we think that Activision has effectively leveraged this success into a transaction with Vivendi Games, thereby making the combined entity into a hybrid play on console gaming and online MMO gaming (via subscriptions). While this new large cap growth story (once the deal closes in early July) has already been garnering investor attention in recent months, we think that quite a few investors have yet to fully appreciate the Activision story as well as its product positioning.

"Looking at the market share trends for Activision and Electronic Arts going back to early 2006, it becomes clear that Activision market share has depicted a steady increase over EA and clearly broke through in mid-2007 (due to Guitar Hero and the Call of Duty franchise) and still continues to hold the lead over EA despite no major releases, per NPD data. While EA has steadily lost market share since mid-2006, Activision has continued to gain traction from its franchises. Keep in mind Rock Band is not included in here, as it is published by MTV games and distributed by Electronic Arts. As we progressed towards the end of 2007, Activision surpassed Electronic Arts, marking the market share inflection point in the marketplace. More near term trends have been masked by the strong growth in Take-Two's GTA 4, driving $257mn in sales in the 2Q."

So there we are. More through the link.